Sewell Setzer was a happy child - before he fell in love with a chatbot and took his own life at 14. His mother has now filed a lawsuit against the most powerful company in the world.
When lawyer Meetali Jain found a call from Megan Garcia in her inbox in Seattle a couple of weeks later, she called back immediately. Jain works for the Tech Justice Law Project, a small nonprofit that focuses on the rights of users on the internet. "When Megan told me about her case, I also didn’t know anything about Character.AI,” Jain says in a video call. "Even though I work in this area, I had never heard of this app.” Jain has two children of her own, eight and 10 years of age. "I asked my son. He doesn’t even have a phone, but he had heard about it at school and through ads on YouTube that specifically target young users. And then I realized that these companies are experimenting with our children without our knowledge.”
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